Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
Graham Greene
-
Standard Name: Greene, Graham
Birth Name: Henry Graham Greene
An English novelist of exceptional energy, Graham Greene
built a career spanning a dozen genres—most notably more than twenty novels or thrillers, as well as short stories, film reviews, travel books, plays, screenplays, and autobiography. Many of his novels wrestle with issues of belief. His personal correspondence included thousands of letters, and for much of his life he reported as a spy to the British Secret Intelligence Service
. His restlessness drew him to dangerous places, adulterous relationships, self-harm, and a belief, infusing his pages, that a focus on squalor makes for an honest portrayal of the world.
Reviews were mixed. Both the New Statesman and the Times Literary Supplement were highly critical, the latter going so far as to call the book a depressingly . . . mechanical exercise in self-pastiche, employing...
Literary responses
Patricia Highsmith
Graham Greene
's foreword observes that this story is hard to beat for pure physical horror, an effect rare in PH
's work.
Wilson, Andrew Norman. Beautiful Shadow: A Life of Patricia Highsmith. Bloomsbury.
267
Literary responses
Patricia Highsmith
She has been better appreciated in Britain than her native USA, and perhaps better in Europe than in Britain. Frank Richards
wrote that she made a life's work of her ostracisation from the American...
Literary responses
Elizabeth Jane Howard
Arthur Koestler
described this, before publication, as a cross between Nancy Mitford
and Evelyn Waugh
. When EJH
told him she was having trouble finishing it, he said she had finished it, and written beyond...
Fictionalization
Violet Hunt
Versions of VH
also emerge in the fictions of her lover, Ford Madox Ford
. Barbara Belford
suggests that she sparked elements of both Leonora Ashburnham and Florence Dowell in his The Good Soldier (1915)...
Intertextuality and Influence
P. D. James
PDJ
followed the English tradition of detective-story writing that has continued from the 1920s and 1930s, a genre in which many women have held dominant positions. She spoke of her adolescent reading as influenced in...
Performance of text
Bryony Lavery
BL
's dramatic adaptation of Graham Greene
's novel Brighton Rock was her latest work to open at the Theatre Royal, York (coinciding with a revival of her Frozen). It then went on tour.
Billington, Michael. “A Criminal Coldness”. Country Life, pp. 94-5.
Elizabeth Northcote, Countess of Iddesleigh, et al. “List of Books by Mrs Belloc Lowndes, Foreword”. Diaries and Letters of Marie Belloc Lowndes, 1911-1947, edited by Susan Lowndes Marques and Susan Lowndes Marques, Chatto and Windus, pp. prelims, 1 - 3.
2
Author summary
Hilary Mantel
The author of twelve novels (ranging from political thrillers through social satire, comedy of manners, and near-gothic), still at the height of her career, HM
has been likened to Muriel Spark
or Edna O'Brien
for...
Set in an unnamed town, which is clearly Brighton, the novel is, as Giles Gordon
describes it, a Graham Greene
thriller as if reworked by a somewhat romantic Burroughs
.
Gordon, Giles, and Ann Quin. “Introduction”. Berg, 1st Dalkey Archive edition, Dalkey Archive, p. vii - xiv.
ix
The first sentence—the...
Literary responses
Kathleen Raine
Graham Greene
responded to this book with what he called an enthusiastic if ignorant howl. Though he had already seen and admired some of her poems, he wrote, he had not realised the quantity of...
Occupation
Naomi Royde-Smith
She covered drama criticism for two years, but remained literary editor for a decade.
Eliot, T. S. The Letters of T.S. Eliot. Editor Eliot, Valerie, Faber and Faber.
1: 149n1
Mary Agnes Hamilton
wrote later: she was a wonderful editor, whose discoveries were endless.
Hamilton, Mary Agnes. Remembering My Good Friends. Jonathan Cape.
137
Her list of...
Intertextuality and Influence
Bernice Rubens
BR
's novel The Ponsonby Post, about an English diplomat in Java, seems to set foot in Graham Greene
territory.
British Books in Print. J. Whitaker and Sons.
1982
“Dictionary of Literary Biography online”. Gale Databases: Literature Resource Center-LRC.
